Kill them all
by ShayneT
Summary: Taylor Hebert wakes with the power of the Gamer, only to face a terrible tragedy that sets her on a path of vengeance.
1. Chapter 1

I should have been terrified.

Lying in a trunk with a bag over my head, my hands tied behind me, I should have been trembling with fear.

The men who'd grabbed me and Dad from the house had been pretty clear about what they planned to do to us; they were going to make an example of us.

Yet my mind was clear and calm.

"Inventory," I muttered.

The screen appeared in front of my face, dimly lighting the area around me. I could see the two other bodies in the trunk; unlike me, they were dead.

I could see twenty slots; I'd filled half of them when I was first experimenting with my power shortly after it had appeared a week ago.

"Slot three," I muttered.

Mom's kitchen knife clattered onto the floor of the trunk. I did my best to roll over and start sawing away at the plastic zip ties.

**-1 hp**

**-1 hp**

**-1 hp**

**-1 hp. **

Although I cut myself repeatedly, there was no blood. My body wasn't as human as it had once been, and the pain was a dull, muted version of what it once would have been.

**-1 hp**

Damn it. This should be easier.

**Skill Leveled Up!**

**Physical Resistance: -2% to all damage taken. Level Two. **

That'd be a lot handier if I didn't only have ten hit points. I might be able to level it up to something decent if me and Dad survived this.

I decided to ignore it for now.

I felt something loosen, and a moment later I was free.

**New Skill Created!**

**Escape Artist: The art of escaping bondage and of wriggling through tight spaces. You can wriggle into any space larger than your head. **

**10% chance. Level one. **

I ignore the message, and I murmur again.

"Inventory, number eight, three units."

I could store up to fifty identical items in one slot. I grabbed the three granola bars and ate them as quickly as I could.

**5 hp restored!**

The better the food, the more I healed, but I couldn't eat the soup I had stored, both because it was still hot, and because the smell might alert the passengers in the car.

It'd only been a week, and I hadn't learned about the healing properties of food until yesterday when Sophia had pushed me down the stairs at school.

That's when I'd gained my first level of physical resistance, and I'd healed at dinner that night.

That gave me an idea.

I turned, leaving the menu on, and I observed the corpses behind me.

**Corpse:**

**A dead man. Only hours dead, he is starting to stink. The tattoos on his neck and his Asian features make it likely that he was a member of the ABB.**

Apparently Observe didn't give me the names of the dead. Because they no longer had identities?

The other two were Caucasians, but observe didn't tell me much other than that one was dressed in a business suit.

Neither of them had anything useful in their pockets. I was considering the thought of banishing all three of them to my inventory; it was getting rank in here.

The car started slowing.

It stopped and I could hear the doors opening.

I touched all three dead men and put them in inventory. I was going to need as much room as I could get. I shifted around.

"You don't have to do this," I could hear Dad pleading. "At least let Taylor go."

"She's seen our faces," a deep voice said. "We can't even whore her out; she's gonna have a grudge. It's nothing personal; the boss just says we have to make an example out of you."

Footsteps were coming around to the back of the car.

They had Dad hostage, but they were planning on killing us both. I didn't have any choice but to fight.

"Inventory, number one," I said.

An iron pot of steaming hot stew appeared in my hands, as hot as it had been the moment I'd put it in inventory. I couldn't put living things in there, but non-living things seemed to be held there in a timeless state.

The trunk opened, and I slung the boiling stew into his face.

He screamed, and I grabbed my knife and stabbed upward at his face.

**CRITICAL HIT: 10 hp!**

**5hp!**

**5 hp!**

Two other men were coming around the corner, while a third man was holding Dad.

I touched the car behind me, and I felt a strain as it vanished.

"Inventory, number eleven!" I shouted, pointing at the men who were pointing their guns at me.

I pointed slightly above them, and the car appeared seven feet in the air.

A moment later it crashed to the ground and the men vanished beneath it. I could see blood pooling from under the car.

"Y...you're a cape," I heard the man holding Dad stutter.

"Yeah," I said.

I touched the car again, and it vanished. The corpses underneath didn't. Gamer's mind helped me to keep from wincing.

"You can let my Dad go," I said. "And you can maybe get to run away. If you kill him, I'm going to drop a car on you, or maybe worse."

"Worse?"

"I'll send you to the bad place," I said.

I bent down and touched the foot of one of the corpses. It vanished.

I touched the next corpse, and it vanished as well. Apparently corpses counted enough as identical that they would stack. I doubted that I'd be able to remember which was which, so I'd have to pull them all out.

"So you've got to touch me?" he said. He stared at me. "Capes have all kinds of limitations."

"I'm not a normal cape," I said. "You think I should teleport you over a volcano, or maybe out to the middle of the ocean? Ocean might be crueler; you'd spend hours drifting, hoping that thing you're seeing on the horizon isn't a shark's fin. Leviathan might even say hello."

"You're bluffing," he said.

"Am I?" I asked. "My Dad is the only thing that you've got that's keeping me from crushing you to death."

The man I'd hit in the face with soup was laying on the ground. He groaned suddenly.

I looked down, and suddenly I felt a sharp pain.

**-8 hp.**

**Skill Leveled Up!**

**Physical Resistance: -3% to all damage taken. Level three. **

I'd been shot!

It looked like the wound had only hit me in the arm.

Dad was struggling with the man, and there was the sound of a second shot.

Dad slumped to the ground, and his killer looked up at me. The reassuring name over Dad's head vanished, replaced in an instant by something else.

I had already cleared the intervening distance with knife in hand, and before he could shoot I was stabbing him.

**5 hp**

**4 hp**

**5 hp**

**Critical hit! 10 hp. **

The man was down, and I kept stabbing him over and over and over. It took me a while to realize that he was dead.

I staggered over to Dad's corpse, and I stared at him.

**Corpse:**

**A dead man. This is the body of the man you loved and knew as your father. He was killed defending you from the Empire. **

Sometimes I hated my power.

I sat and stared. After a few moments, I grabbed a few more granola bars out of my inventory and I began eating.

**New Quest!**

**Kill them all. **

**The Empire has been terrorizing your home town for far too long. Now they've killed the last member of your family. **

**Reward: 50,000 experience points. Notoriety.**

**Failure: Death. **

I thought about it for a minute, and then I clicked yes.

What else did I have to do? My whole family was dead, and I knew who was responsible.

I should have been enraged, or at least overwhelmed with grief. Instead I only felt a weird kind of dull numbness.

I'd heard that psychopaths were that way partially because they couldn't feel fear. Part of the reason people could empathize with others was that they'd experienced similar emotions before and could empathize.

The Gamer's mind kept me from feeling fear. Did that also mean that I'd never really feel sadness, or love, or anything?

I could probably feel rage, if what I'd heard about gamers was true.

Maybe being a psychopath wouldn't be that bad, if it let me do what I was planning to do.

I finally looked around.

We were in the woods; from the length of the drive, it couldn't be more than ten miles outside of town.

I could guess the direction Brockton Bay was because there was only one set of large woodlands nearby.

I looked at the car; the seven foot drop looked like it had damaged the car too much to be used.

I used my inventory to begin moving bodies; into inventory, and then out of it and into the car. One after the others, with the exception of Dad, who went into his own inventory box. I could keep him there, timeless until I decided what to do with him.

The car went into my inventory too. I suspected that it was getting close to the limit of what I could place in the inventory, although it was possible that I could put more than one in there. I'd have to practice and see once I got back to town.

I started walking.

I was going to kill them, but first I needed to get stronger. I needed to actually figure my powers out instead of stumbling on new features every few days.

The last thing I needed was surprises. Taking on a group with hundreds of thugs and the most parahumans of any group in the Bay would take planning, and it would take power.

Fortunately, my power was the kind that seemed to thrive on escalation.

It was time to begin my quest.


	2. Home base

It was three in the morning by the time I got home. If it weren't for Gamer's body, I'd have been exhausted, my feet dragging, aching and sore.

Instead, I gained two points of constitution and a hit point.

That was exciting.

If I was going to be getting into a lot of fights, I was going to need all the hit points I could get. The damage reduction was going to help, but without the ability to survive in the first place, I was in deep trouble.

A glancing shot from a gun had almost killed me.

If it weren't for Gamer's mind I would have been freaked out by that, much less by the fact that Dad was dead. Or maybe I'd have been in shock, still in denial and feeling numb.

I actually felt like that.

I reached into my inventory and pulled out my backpack. I'd been using a decoy at school so Emma and the others would have something to focus on. It had driven them crazy when I'd pulled out homework after they'd doused my backpack in noxious liquids.

The trick to my inventory was that you could put lots of things into one thing. If I'd tried to put all the things in my backpack in my inventory individually I'd have used up all the slots and still have things left over.

I'd only had my power for a week, and I'd hardly done anything with it. Maybe if I had I'd have been able to save Dad.

Well, I couldn't dwell on that now... literally.

Pulling my key from my backpack, I unlocked the door, and I slipped inside.

The Empire were going to notice when their men didn't come back, and our house was one of the first places that they were going to look. That meant that I had a limited amount of time to get the things I was going to need and then I was going to have to get out.

Immediately I headed for the basement to get as many boxes as I could. I headed for the pantry and began filling the boxes, carrying them out to the car.

Dad still had the keys in his pocket.

The Empire had caught us on our front lawn before we'd had a chance to get in the house.

None of the neighbors had even bothered to call the police, or there would be crime scene evidence everywhere. I could still see the blood stains on the porch from where they'd hit Dad in full view of all the neighbors.

I grabbed as many clothes as I could and took them down to the car. There wasn't a lot of money in the house. Summoning the other car, I went through the pockets of the bodies, coming up with five hundred dollars in bills of various denominations.

When I tried to put it into my inventory, I discovered that it had its own placeholder; it didn't take up a slot.

I left the computer; it was old and there wasn't likely to be an internet connection where I was going.

I grabbed a lot of Dad's clothes too; hopefully this would make the Empire think that we had both gotten away. They'd be looking for a man and a teenager instead of a teenager alone.

When I'd gotten as many things as I could think that I would need- I took my entire bed, even though it took up a slot, and I took a sleeping bag.

I took cleaning supplies too; I doubted that there would be a maid where I was going.

I could have tried to drive the car, but I hadn't learned how yet.

Leaving the other car crossed my mind; a car full of bodies would be a declaration of war with the Empire. Unfortunately, at the moment my only real offensive power was my Inventory, and I didn't want to ruin Dad's car by dropping it on top of some thugs.

Brockton Bay wasn't safe for anyone, much less a teenage girl out late at night. The ABB was known for enslaving girls and throwing them into brothels.

I was going to have to go to ground somewhere in the Docks area, too.

While I was white, that wasn't all that unusual in the Docks. More importantly, the Merchants didn't have the kind of force they needed to keep the Empire out.

The ABB did.

The problem was that I lacked a lot of the skills I was going to need to survive on my own. I needed a place with access to food and water, although in a pinch I could likely use my inventory for that.

Electrical power would be nice; even this early in the year there were often terrible storms that came through town.

The odds were that I wouldn't find any of that, and even if there was such a place, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to break in.

I hesitated as I passed by the bookshelf. I now only needed an hour of sleep a night, and I'd once heard that half the reason the homeless fell into drugs was boredom.

I started putting the books I hadn't read into a box, along with a few favorites.

There were some other books. I hesitated as I looked at the Red Cross First Aid Manual.

I no longer bled, which meant that the manual was likely useless to me. Still, it was possible that I might want to help other people.

I grabbed the book, only to stop as a pop up appeared.

**Do you want to select a skill book?"**

**Yes/ No**

Wait. What?

"Observe," I murmured.

**The American Red Cross First Aid and Safety Handbook****Paperback****– May 27, 1992**

**This is a book your mother used often when you were young. You were a clumsy thing, weren't you?**

I sometimes wondered if my power was an asshole, or if my unconscious mind simply hated me.

The cursor blinked on yes, and finally I touched it.

There was a flash of light, and my mind flooded with knowledge. I knew how to perform CPR, or at least the best version from 1992. I knew how to handle minor injuries and contusions.

**NEW SKILL CREATED!**

**First aid**-**The first moments after an injury are the most critical. This skill allows you to treat wounds and stabilize the dying. Keep your friends alive and make your enemies suffer longer! Beginner level. **

There wasn't a percentage listed. I was a little relieved, because I'd have hated to have only a ten percent chance to stabilizing someone. I knew what was in the book as though I'd been practicing it for a long time, but I only knew what was in the book.

Excitedly, I looked for other skill books on the bookshelves.

Unfortunately, other than a beginners guide to fishing, I didn't find anything that gave me any skills.

It was already four o'clock, and in an hour the neighbors would be getting up for work. I needed to be out of sight before nine; truant officers paid serious attention to kids out during the school day because the schools lost a lot of money every day we missed.

At least I wasn't going back to Winslow.

**New Quest!**

**Find a home base.**

**Find a place where you can rest, relax and plot the demise of your enemies. **

**Reward: 100 xp.**

**Failure: Death or capture by the authorities. **

**Yes/ No**

I hesitated.

Would capture by the authorities be so bad? Maybe I could go to the PRT and demand justice for my father. I had powers, and that meant that they were likely to listen to me.

They were always in desperate need of parahumans, and they would likely arrange for a foster family, or I might even be able to live at the rig. I could go to Arcadia, and my life would go back to normal.

I stopped at that thought.

My life was never going to be normal again. Mom had been taken from me by an accident, but Dad's death had been _ordered_.

They'd wanted control of the Dock Worker's Union, presumably so they'd have people in place when they finally got the courage to attack Lung and his people.

He'd refused multiple times; he'd even tried to send me over to the Barnes' house, not understanding why I didn't want to go.

Now he never would.

The gangs did this all the time; they ruined people's lives and they threw people away like they were toilet paper.

I'd dreamed of being a hero when I was younger, of being an Alexandria, a Legend, even an Armsmaster.

But the heroes weren't going to let me do what I had to do. They'd had thirty years to clean up the Bay, and it was worse than it had ever been.

They might even call me a villain before I was done.

It didn't matter.

This would have been easier if I'd had a bicycle. Instead, after locking the door behind me, I turned and I vanished Dad's car, full of everything I'd been able to think of.

Then I began to run.

The Gamer's Body was probably the best part of my power other than the Inventory.

In my old body I'd have been out of breath in less than a block. Now I simply gained the fatigued condition after three blocks.

I only felt mildly tired, so I pushed past that.

Three blocks after that I gained the exhausted condition. While I didn't really feel any more tired, I discovered that no matter how hard I tried to run, my running speed was reduced to half.

I slowed to a walk.

It'd be ridiculous to get killed because I was too exhausted to run away.

At this hour, not even the criminals were up. With less than an hour until the early risers started getting ready for work, the criminals were already heading for bed.

It took almost thirty minutes for my condition to return to normal. I started to jog again.

**Through vigorous exercise, you have increased your endurance. +2 to constitution and +1 hit point. **

That took me to twelve hit points... a measly number, but even a single point might make the difference between my living and dying in a fight.

If the damage I'd done in my first fight was any indication, I could maybe survive being stabbed twice by a determined teenage girl, unless she got lucky.

If I could ever get my damage resistance up to a reasonable level, at least twenty percent, it might start making a difference too.

Maybe I should have tried driving Dad's car. It would have gotten me where I wanted to go a lot faster, and it wouldn't have left me alone in the middle of a creepy street in the middle of the night.

Apparently I could still feel unease, even with the Gamer's mind. That was good to know.

The buildings here were getting older and more decrepit the farther I went.

My other reason for going to the Docks was that in the Merchant areas, the homeless tended to have already taken all the good spots.

The ABB intimidated enough of them that I might be able to find a spot to hide.

Looking at the warehouses around me, though, I didn't feel particularly encouraged. I might be able to jimmy a door with a crowbar, but then I'd have an open door to my place.

I couldn't simply inventory a door; I wasn't able to take part of an object without taking all of it, and I had a feeling that an entire warehouse was well above my limit.

Just walking by and checking doors showed all of them to be securely shut. Any that weren't would be useless for my purposes.

Finally I found something that might work.

The warehouses might as well have been vaults as far as I was concerned, but there was an old red brick fire station up ahead. The overhead door was down and a quick check showed that it was locked.

There were windows on the second floor though, and several drain pipes.

Only one of them toward the back was even close to strong enough to hold my weight; the others were rusted through, likely due to the Brockton Bay weather and the salt water from the bay.

Fortunately, the back also had a window where a board looked loose.

I hoisted myself up and started to climb.

**-8 hp.**

**Skill Leveled Up!**

**Physical Resistance: -4% to all damage taken. Level four. **

Crap.

If I'd been a normal person, a fall from ten feet would have probably broken my leg or my ankle.

I pulled some cereal bars from my inventory.

As I chewed on them I stared at the drain pipe, and I considered my options.

The smartest way for me to get up would be a ladder; I could summon it and send it back when I didn't need it. We didn't have one at home; Dad had always preferred to leave roofing and other tasks for the professionals.

In the meantime, though...

I looked around, and when I saw no one in the area, I summoned Dad's car as close to the wall as I could. I then clambered up on the hood and on the roof.

I climbed up onto the pole, and then I reached down with my toe and inventoried my car again. I had to touch an item to inventory it, although I could pull it out of inventory and place it anywhere within fifty feet or so of me.

I pulled myself up, and I found the window I'd spotted on the back wall that had some loose boards. I climbed up as well as I could, and I reached out and managed to pull the loose board out.

I tried to pull on the other boards, but they were nailed in solidly, and I didn't have the leverage to force them out.

The space was larger than my head, but not my much. Well, ten percent was better than nothing.

I squeezed and tried everything I could to get inside., but there wasn't enough room. No matter how I wriggled, I simply couldn't get through...

"Inventory clothes," I said.

Now nude as the day I was born, I was able to slip through. My clothes were bulky, especially since I'd been bullied and had been trying to hide my body due to pointed comments from Emma.

A gesture and my clothes were back on me. I wondered if I could swap clothes back and forth this way; if I could, then wearing a costume was going to be easy.

I wasn't close to that yet though.

**Skill leveled up!**

**Escape Artist: The art of escaping bondage and of wriggling through tight spaces. You can wriggle into any space larger than your head. **

**20% chance. Level two. **

Somehow this wasn't a skill I expected to use a lot. Once I got started, the gangs were likely to put a bullet in my head if they caught me.

**New Skill Created: **

**Climbing**

**You are skilled at scaling surfaces, including those that are angled and uneven. Reach new heights and look down on everyone else. 10 % Level One. **

Maybe I'd skip the ladder. Being able to climb up on roofs like a monkey was a superhero thing, right? At least it was in Dad's old Pre-Scion superhero comics.

The skill book hadn't given me percentages, but skills I learned on my own apparently did. Or was it because these were physical skills as opposed to general knowledge like first aid?

It was terribly dark in here; it took my eyes a little bit to get adjusted to the light.

The whole place was filled with dust and cobwebs. The great thing about a firehouse was that they were meant to have people living in them twenty four hours a day. That meant that it had showers and toilets, even if the water wasn't running.

It would have a place for Dad's car down in the bay where the fire engine had once sat. If I could find a better way to get in and out, it'd be perfect.

What I could see in the shadows was encouraging. There was a large, empty room, with a kitchen through a door in the back. There weren't any appliances; those had all been taken a long time ago, but there was still a sink.

A bathroom was off down a hallway.

Maybe I could find some skillbooks on plumbing, and find a way to steal water. Otherwise, I'd have to survive on bottles of water.

I could likely flush the toilet if I had water to pour into the tank. It was something to think about.

I'd probably have to get some bug bombs, or I'd wake up with a spider on my face. This place was going to need a lot of work before it would be livable.

Still, I'd found it.

I looked in front of me waiting for an announcement, but none came.

Was there something I was missing?

Oh.

I pulled my bed from the inventory, and the screen appeared.

**Quest completed!**

**Find a home base.**

**Find a place where you can rest, relax and plot the demise of your enemies. **

**Reward: 100 xp.**

I dismissed my bed; no way I was going to let the creepy crawlies climb between my sheets while I was trying to clean the rest of this place.

Fortunately, because I only needed an hour of sleep, I had seven hours to kill.

I slid down the fireman's pole, and I pulled out Dad's car. I'd had the foresight to stash a few cleaning supplies, and so I got into the car and I got to work.

I hated bugs, and I definitely had no intention of sleeping in a place full of them. I'd sleep in the car first.

Still, this was a good start, assuming I could keep people from seeing me go in and out. Maybe I could come up with a better route that people wouldn't notice.

Part of me wanted to start going out to stop the Empire, but I wasn't nearly ready yet. Four percent damage reduction and twelve hit points meant that I was dead if someone hit anything other than my limbs with a gun... pretty much like anyone else, except that it would hurt me less.

For once I had to be smart about this.

**For wise decision making you gain +1 Wisdom. **

Thanks, power.


	3. Skills

Cleaning had taken all of the seven hours and then some, and even then I was a little nervous about the prospect of waking up with a roach on my shoulder.

My solution was to vanish my bed when I was done with it; I couldn't store living things, and so inventorying my bed likely got rid of any skin mites or other unwanted things, and it would keep some of them from taking residence in my bed before I slept there the next time.

I'd been afraid that I wouldn't be able to sleep, but I was exhausted even with Gamer's body by the time I was done.

I woke up refreshed, and with all my status conditions restored. That included exhausted and depressed.

I hadn't even realized that I was depressed. That was strange.

I did feel much better after sleeping, though. I'd have to remember that feeling of being in shock.

I couldn't cook, both because I didn't have appliances and because the smell of food coming from an abandoned building would be a dead giveaway.

It'd be a good idea to keep any food vanished unless I was eating it because that would keep the bugs away.

It was one PM, which meant that I was going to be conspicuous for the next couple of hours.

While Brockton Bay couldn't afford many truant officers, the police seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in arresting kids if they were out during school hours.

The smart thing to do would be to keep everything in my inventory whenever I was gone; it would keep people from stealing my stuff. They'd know someone had been here because everything was clean, but without the pictures and everything they wouldn't know who had been there.

I made breakfast from some of the food in the pantry; I didn't cook anything so it was mostly a can of beans and another can of corn. I hadn't farted in the past two weeks since gaining Gamer's Body, which meant I could likely eat whatever I wanted.

Eventually I'd want to get a fake driver's license. That would help me be out during school hours and I might be able to drive Dad's car. There was no way I was going to be able to get around the whole city by running, unless I was able to level up some kind of running skill like Velocity.

That was an intriguing thought, though.

The most efficient run was a jog, and I'd recently read that the average man jogged at 8.3 miles per hour, while the average woman jogged 6.5 miles per hour. New runners averaged four miles an hour.

The fastest sprinters might reach twenty five miles an hour for short bursts.

Even doubling my normal running speed would make me as fast as the average man. Once I got my endurance up, I'd be half again as fast as them.

I needed to improve my strength, my speed, and I needed to learn combat skills and stealth. Weapons skills would be good, as would weapons.

I had the guns from the Empire corpses; there were only three of them, with a couple of boxes of ammunition. The problem with that was that I didn't really know how to fire a gun.

I was going to have to look for skill books.

I'd been so shocked about the skills I'd gotten from the Red Cross Book yesterday that I'd barely noticed the book turn to dust. That meant that I couldn't just go to the Library and get my fill of books.

I only had five hundred dollars, and I was going to have to use that money to fill my other needs too, That meant that I needed to go to a used bookstore.

Fortunately, I knew of one near the Lord's street market.

I might be able to get some of the other things I needed there too. It was essentially a giant flea market and sometimes they had overstock from expensive shops for ten to twenty five percent of the ordinary price.

Most bookstores were filled with a lot of fiction; I hadn't got any skills from the Lord of the Rings or any of the fantasy books. I'd have to look around to see what was available.

Peering outside, I looked out into the alley. Across the way was a row of nondescript warehouses, which meant that unless someone happened to be coming down the alley, no one was going to see me slipping out.

I loosened some of the boards before I left; it was a lot easier when you weren't hanging off the side of a building. I managed to clamber down the drain pipe, gaining another 10 percent to my climb skill.

It _did_ seem easier to climb down than it had the night before, but I couldn't tell whether it was ten or twenty percent easier, or maybe faster?

My power didn't have much of a help menu, and I'd tried looking for one. I'd been forced to ask Greg Veder the definitions of some things, and that had made him think I was interested in him.

The only was to really tell what was going on was to pay attention as the numbers went up and see whether it meant easier, faster or both. I was hoping for both.

That'd mean that I could have numbers over a hundred percent. Three hundred percent added to my base climbing speed would make me four times as fast. That'd put me at fifteen seconds, maybe faster if I got used to climbing this particular pole.

I was wearing a hoodie, and I started jogging.

Apparently a +4 constitution meant something I was able to run eight blocks before getting any fatigue messages, and sixteen before slipping into exhausted.

**NEW SKILL CREATED!**

**Running... the art of learning how to really move. Put one foot in front of the other and breathe. It really doesn't seem much like a skill when put like that. +10% to speed and to endurance. Level one. **

Endurance...that was how far I could run without getting tired, right?

My constitution was already allowing me to run longer distances; presumably the running skill stacked on top of that, but only for running and not things like carrying heavy weights?

This skill excited me more than the escape artist and climbing skills, probably because it was going to make my life easier more quickly.

The fact that I didn't sweat hadn't struck me before, but it did now. Apparently Gamer's body had more implications than just having hit points and not bleeding. I also didn't fart or sweat.

That probably meant I was going to stink a lot slower than someone else in my situation. I'd probably have to have a shower eventually. Maybe I could rig something up with a five gallon jug of water.

If it fell on my head, my damage resistance would go up, and if it didn't, then I'd have my shower.

I wondered if I could simply put pure water in my inventory and then slowly release it over my own head. It was something to consider.

I might even be able to get hot water from a tap and have a hot shower.

I walked until my fatigued condition reset, which seemed to take fifteen minutes, and then I started running again. By the time I reached the Lord's Street Market, I had gained another ten percent to my running, and it was a clear difference to me.

I was running further and easier. I wasn't sweaty, and I wasn't even out of breath. I was wearing my hoodie so my youth wouldn't be obvious.

It was a Friday, and so a lot of the stalls were opening up in preparation for the weekend.

A lot of the stalls weren't things I cared about. There were lots of jewelry and homemade crafts that people were trying to sell. Some people paid fifty bucks for a stall and then basically had a garage sale with a guaranteed audience.

I began going through every book I could see looking for skill books.

_Basic pottery making_ was a skill book, apparently, but it didn't seem like something I needed right now. Neither did _Origami 365_, _Stained Glass making basics_, or _The beginner's guide to cheesemaking. _

I did buy _Bruce Lee's Fighting method_, _Complete Krav Maga_, which was supposedly an ultimate guide to over 250 fighting methods, and _Karate- the complete Kata._

Excited, I slipped into the bathroom of Fugly Bobs and I devoured all three books.

**New Skill Created!**

**Unarmed combat: The art of using your body to make an impact on people. Many different methods exist to do this, and you have a chance to learn them all. +30% chance to hit people, and +30% damage. Level 3.**

Each book had added a level, presumably because they dealt with different combat styles and there wasn't that much overlap. Presumably if I found a book that didn't have a lot of new information, I wouldn't get much.

I now understood Jeet Kune Do, or at least as much of it as had been in the book. I understood Krav Maga, and I understood Karate.

I felt like I could take on Lung, but I knew that this was foolishness. Those were beginner's books, and it was likely that a lot of gangsters had skills that were far beyond that, even if I was able to mix styles.

The bonus to damage would be more important once I got my strength better.

I'd been doing five points with a knife, and I'd only had an 8 strength, which I gathered from my other stats was below average, likely because I was a teenage girl.

If I could do three points with a kick, that 30% might actually make a small difference.

After ordering two burgers, I went back to looking for skill books.

The next book I found, surprisingly was called _The Subtle art of not giving a fuck. _

This was a skill book?

I looked at the back of the book.

_For decades, we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F**k positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, shit is f**ked and we have to live with it."_

Instead of turning lemons into lemonade, he apparently thought we just had to learn to stomach lemons better.

After a moment, I set the book back on the table and smiled at the proprietor.

I suspected that I'd need all the fucks I had to complete the mission, and that if I lost that I'd end up working for the PRT.

Either that or I'd quickly learn the lessons in the book on my own.

Oh!

_Put em down take em out: Knife fighting techniques from Folsom prison. _

I bought it, and I assimilated it the moment I was out of sight.

My mind filled with knowledge; even though the book was very thin, it had a lot of things in it that were surprising.

Apparently knife fighting didn't really exist.

If someone used a knife on you, they didn't want to fight you. They wanted to kill you. Knife fights were brutal and they tended to be short. Legally, they were attempted murder at best.

If you were going to use a knife, it meant that you should use any dirty trick to stay alive.

**New Skill Created!**

**Bladed Weapon proficiency: the fine art of separating people from their hard earned blood. Use it for fun or profit. +10% to damage and to chance to hit. Level One. **

Now all I needed was a stealth skill and maybe a gun book, and I'd be ready to take on the world.

Unfortunately after my initial successes, finding useful skill books quickly became much more difficult. There were some- books on candle making, on making jewelry, on painting and drawing, on singing- but none of them were going to get me closer to my goal, and I couldn't afford to spend money on anything I didn't absolutely need.

The bookstore did yield one book.

_Nature's way-Native Wisdom for Living in balance with the Earth. _

**New Skill Created!**

**Stealth- the skill of going unnoticed. Useful for hiding from your enemies, attacking from concealment, and tracking people and animals. Become a complete nonentity. +10 percent chance. Level one. **

The books had set me back twenty dollars despite being used. The two burgers had set me back ten dollars, but I had one still hot in my inventory ready for supper.

"Can I look at the knives?" I asked a grungy looking man at a stand.

He didn't question me, and I looked it over. A Ka-Bar knife, it looked good to me. Unfortunately, the book on knife fighting had been long on technique, but hadn't talked a lot about knife construction.

"How much?"

"Seventy bucks," he said.

I sighed and handed it back to him. I'd have to make due with the knives I'd picked up off the bodies of the Empire guys.

"How about the pepper spray," I asked.

"It's illegal to sell to a minor." he said.

"Wait," I said. "So you can sell me this knife, but not pepper spray?"

"Can't sell you a stun gun either," he said. "If this was Boston I couldn't sell any of it to you; can't sell blades to minors within the city limits."

"That's weird," I said.

He shrugged.

"Gotta follow the law. Now if you could get an adult to buy it for you..."

Essentially he was hinting that I should get a homeless man to buy it for me.

Well, I'd get a fake ID sooner or later.

I had what I needed for now. When I had more money I could buy better weapons and the like.

I waited for a moment, but I didn't get a point of wisdom.

Stupid, judgmental power. What did it know?

"Thanks," I said. "I might be back in a couple of weeks when I get my allowance."

"What are you looking for," he said. "Once you have the money."

"Self defense," I said. "The Bay isn't safe for girls my age."

He grimaced.

"Might give you a discount when you come back," he said. "It's not right what they've done to this city."

"Yeah," I said. "Somebody should do something about that."

He shook his head.

"Everybody's too afraid. The cops, the heroes, regular Joes... go after the gangs, and they'll come after you and your family... especially if you aren't a cape."

"Well, here's to hoping somebody does something," I said.

I left the Market and headed back home. I didn't run; I wasn't in that much of a hurry, and there wasn't anything I had to do in particular.

It was almost five minutes before I noticed that as the crowd thinned out, three men were still heading in the same direction as I was.

They were walking, but faster than I was. They were closing the distance fairly rapidly.

The largest of them had tattoos on his neck and the others didn't look much better.

They'd been nearby when I'd been talking to the knife vendor.

"Girlie!" I heard one of them call out. "We'd like to have a talk with you."

Three against one, and I had no idea how skillful they were. It was bad odds. I had my guns in inventory, but ammunition was limited, and it was close enough to the Lord's market that they'd call the police.

I could maybe drop a car on them, but if they dodged, I wouldn't be able to do it again because I'd foolishly left Dad's car back at the base.

Maybe I could bluff my way out.

"Leave me alone!" I said. I tried to make my voice sound panicky, but acting had never been my strong suit.

I picked up my pace, and they followed.

Could I simply outpace them? Women ran slower than men, but I had a slight enhancement.

I broke out into a run.

Even if I wasn't faster than them, if I had more endurance it wouldn't matter. The smart move was to double around and go back to the market. There were Enforcers there, and they weren't likely to try anything in a crowd.

I could even go to a cop. I'd tell them I was Emma Barnes and that those guys were harassing me. I could probably get out while they were arguing with him.

That'd be the smart thing to do.

Unfortunately, these were the same kind of people who'd killed Dad. I'd heard that they had to kill a minority just to get into the gang; it was possible that was just an urban legend. It probably was, but for the moment I was choosing to believe that it was true.

Even if it wasn't, they knew what they were getting into when they got into the gang. Every one of them were accessories to the crimes that their fellow gang members committed.

I doubted that they knew my face; Danny Hebert had been a bump in the road to their ambitions, and as his daughter I'd have been even less important.

Deliberately I turned down an alley, and it was only a few moments before they were at the mouth of the alley.

"Dumb bitch, aren't you," the bald man said. "Talking smack about the gangs out in the open. Running into an alleyway."

"Don't hurt me," I said.

My performance must not have been very convincing, because one of the men looked uncertainly at his boss.

"Something's wrong," he said. "She's not scared."

"Oh," I said. "But I AM scared. Scared you're going to get away."

Then I dropped a car on them.


	4. Wind

Two of them lunged for me even as the car crushed the man behind them. They looked back, and I saw the realization on their faces.

"Cape!" the smarter one shouted.

I was already lunging forward while they were distracted.

**Critical Hit!**

**14 hp damage!**

I stabbed him in the arm, and I must have hit a vein, because he staggered back and was suddenly bleeding all over everything.

The big man lunged toward me; his knife was a lot bigger than mine, but I managed to step aside. I slashed at him, but he was able to move out of the way.

We slashed at each other, dancing around each other. The footwork I'd learned from Bruce Lee's book was helpful, and Krav Maga had some information about knife fighting.

I lunged for him, and he punched me in the side of the head.

**-5 hp**

I spun around, but he grabbed my arm, and it was like my arm was suddenly caught in a steel vise.

"What are you gonna do now, girly?"

"Inventory," I said.

A knife appeared in my other hand, and I stabbed down, hitting him in the thigh,

Critical Hit!

-14 hp!

He dropped my arm and grabbed for his leg, which was now gushing blood. I took advantage of his distraction to stab wildly at him over and over again.

He fell and I kept stabbing until I was sure he was down.

I turned, and I stared at the other man, who was still alive, although his eyes looked a little glassy.

"Why the fuck were you following me?" I asked. I kicked his knife away and I leaned down, watching to make sure that he didn't suddenly lunge at me.

Had they recognized me? Was it because I'd been talking about the gangs? Why had they targeted me out of all the people at the market?

"You were talking to that sand nigger," he said.

"What?" I asked. I was genuinely confused.

"Guy at the knife stand. Made us all sick, white girl flirting with some subhuman."

"He was an Arab?" I asked.

He'd seemed a little swarthy, but I'm mostly noticed his lack of hygiene and his thin, patchy beard.

"You know he was," he said. "Couldn't wait to get a piece of it, could you?"

"I was buying a knife, you fuck!" I said. I waved the knife still in my hand, and droplets of blood hit him in the face.

"Couldn't know you were a crazy bitch," he said.

"I'm not crazy!" I said. I stepped on his leg and he groaned. "I might even be able to help you."

"You killed Karl," he said. "Dropped a car on Earl. Why'd you help me?"

"Tell me where Othalla is, and I'll take you to her," I said.

He spat at me.

"You just want to stab her too," he said. "I'm not giving you shit."

"Well, you might have a point there," I said. "I'm going to kill every one of you sooner or later, and killing your healer might just make that go a little faster."

He stared at me.

"I'm not gonna betray my friends," he said.

"Oh, I think you just might," I said. I pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He tried to stop me as I grabbed his hand and pressed his thumb against the phone.

His information popped up.

He took his hand off his arm, and tried to grab for the phone, but all that did was make him bleed faster.

"You'll do just as much good for me dead as alive," I said.

"There's no contact information in there," he snarled weakly, his hand back on the wound. "You think we're stupid?"

"I'll call them and tell them that I found this phone," I said. "And then I'll murder them when they come to get it. Rinse and repeat."

"They'll send Hookwolf, you bitch."

"For you?" I shook my head. "You're a low level nobody. They'll send someone higher up the chain. I might be able to knock a few of you off before people start getting worried."

I wasn't actually going to do that. I needed to kill the entire organization, not just a few flunkies. The longer it took for them to realize they were being targeted, the better.

There was a way I could use it, though. I could look through his texts and find out meeting places, depending on how smart he was about covering his tracks. He seemed like he was smart enough, but the other two seemed like idiots.

I flipped through his texts, and I was already seeing a few promising places.

"You've been very helpful," I said, looking up.

He wasn't moving.

"Observe," I said.

He was a corpse, according to my power.

"Give my regards to your friend," I said after a moment. "You won't be lonely long."

**Kill them all. **

**The Empire has been terrorizing your home town for far too long. Now they've killed the last member of your family. **

**Reward: 50,000 experience points. Notoriety.**

**Failure: Death. **

**(6/880).**

**You have leveled up!**

**You now have 24 hit points. **

**Bladed Weapon proficiency is now level 2. +20% damage and chance to hit. **

**You have two ability points to allot. Would you like to apply them now?**

I heard the sound of people shouting in the distance, probably due to the sound of the falling car. My guess would be that they would be looking for a car crash.

"Inventory," I said with the first body, and then again with the second.

I inventoried the car, and then the body underneath. When I had time I'd shove the three bodies in the car to save my slots, but I didn't have time at the moment.

Maybe I should try actually shoving the bodies inside instead of inventorying them in. It might help with my strength.

I ran to the corner, and I could hear people but not see them yet.

I sprinted in the opposite direction , heading back toward the Lord's street market. They'd be looking for someone to be running away, which was the last thing I needed.

I calmly went to a bus stop nearby, and I waited for a bus.

A police car went screaming by. Had someone found the blood puddles and the... liquids left by the crushed man? Or was it just my own guilty conscience?

I calmly boarded the bus, and I rode toward the Docks.

Staring at my hands, I wondered why they weren't shaking. They were supposed to shake after killing someone.

Was I really a psychopath? Or did it not really feel real to me, in the same way that Dad's death still didn't feel real.

Was that all Gamer's mind did? Did it make everything feel distant and unreal so that you could kill people without guilt?

Or would I have never felt guilt, not really, and this was part of myself that I simply had never had a chance to discover.

The best I could come up with over the next twenty minutes was that as long as I was worried about it, I was probably Ok. Once I stopped worrying about it, that might mean I wasn't.

Of course, by them I wouldn't realize I was off the deep end.

At the next stop, a woman got on the bus. Her eyes narrowed as she saw me, and she sat down beside me.

She was looking at me and I wasn't sure why.

"Observe," I murmured under my breath.

**ANNETTE AVELINA**

**Level 3**

**Social Worker. **

Great.

She had to be named after my mother.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You've got blood on your sleeve," she said.

Crap.

None of it was my blood, but I couldn't exactly say that. I hadn't even noticed. How many people had seen me with blood on my sleeve and hadn't wanted to ask any questions.

"I cut myself," I said.

Shit. I should have said it was ketchup.

"It's a lot of blood to be just a cut," she said. She leaned forward. "If you're in trouble, I can get help for you. I run a battered women's shelter. We don't give out the address for obvious reasons, but I'd be happy to take you there."

I shook my head.

"I've got to get home to my Dad."

"Did he do this to you?"

My head snapped up.

"No!" I said. "He'd never hurt me! He's a good man!"

"But he lets you run around after dark, in this part of the city?"

"I'm on a bus," I said. "It's not completely safe, but the gangs mostly leave the bus alone."

"There's still random crazies," she said.

Yeah, like teenaged girls out to murder almost nine hundred people.

"I can handle myself," I said. "This is mostly ketchup anyway. I spilled it when I cut myself."

"I've seen ketchup," she said. "And I've seen blood."

She reached into her purse, and I tensed.

All she did was pull out a business card.

"Give me a call if you need a safe place to sleep," she said. "And I'll do what I can to help you."

I looked at her card, and then I stuffed it into a pocket. It wasn't like I had to call her or anything.

Why was I even talking to her anyway? I could have just turned away and ignored her.

"You're a brave one," I found myself saying.

She was silent.

"The people you're protecting, the people who are after them are bad guys. They have no problem beating on women they supposedly love. You they don't love, and you're trying to take their women away from them."

"They aren't their women," she said. "They're their own people. Women aren't property."

"Tell that to the ABB," I muttered.

"I would," she said. "Until people actually stand up, even when it's hard, the world is never going to change."

"Sounds like a good way to get hurt."

"Somebody always gets hurt," she said. "Because the people who benefit from how things are tend to lash out when other people try to change things."

"This is my stop," I said.

It wasn't, of course, but I didn't need anyone knowing where I was. There was a chance that someone had already reported me to the police.

It was just as likely that no one had; our neighbors certainly hadn't when the Empire had come calling.

However, the police might ask questions, assuming they were motivated enough, and it was possible that Annette would be concerned enough to make the call herself.

I ran in the opposite direction of the base, and I looped around the block after the bus was out of sight.

Why had I talked to her?

I'd only been on my own for less than a day. Surely I couldn't be lonely in that short of a time?

It wasn't like I'd had many pleasant interactions with people before.

I'd essentially been shunned in school, mostly by people who were afraid to be seen near me lest they become targets of the bullies.

Was it because this wasn't the kind of thing where you could have friends?

When I looked forward, all I could see was years of living like this. Living alone, off the scraps I managed to steal from corpses, eating fast food that would clog arteries if I still had any. Day in and day out, the same thing.

Was this going to be my life?

It was very possible that the Empire might replace their numbers faster than I could kill them. What would I do when I saw their numbers rise to twelve hundred, or fifteen hundred, or two thousand?

Would this be a losing battle, climbing up a hill of sand?

I'd killed three men today, and I wasn't sure I knew how I felt about that. What would happen if I killed fifteen, or a hundred. Would a sea of blood be enough to satisfy me?

Would it be bad to try to be a hero instead?

My mind was blank for a moment.

The heroes hadn't saved my father. They hadn't saved me. In a way, they'd contributed to Dad's death, because they'd allowed the gangs free reign.

I had to do this despite my doubts.

As lonely as it was likely to be, I was set on this course of action. I had some paper back at home, and I was going to start writing down locations and names, and trying to figure out who was who.

I couldn't just start wandering around looking for people with neck tattoos, not even in Empire territory. If I started stabbing everyone who had a tattoo I was likely to be pretty unpopular pretty fast.

As soon as I got back to the base, I unloaded the car. After having been dropped twice, it was pretty much a wreck. It wasn't likely to drive again.

I tried to pick up the bodies and put them in the car, in an effort to make myself stronger, but I pretty quickly learned the definition of dead weight.

I couldn't even pick up the smallest guy, much less the massive bruiser. The guy crushed by the car I didn't want to handle.

I inventoried them, and then released them into the back seat. I had six bodies in there now. I rifled through pockets for the cell phones I'd ignored the first time and I winced at the smell. They weren't rotting, but I was pretty sure all of them had released their bowels when they'd died.

I re-inventoried the car, and then I sat down with the cell phones and starting going through the texts, making notes as I went. I didn't want to do this for too long; I'd seen enough crime shows to know that the government could ping cell phone towers or whatever to find out where people were.

Having the phones out of space and time entirely was the best way to handle that.

Pretty soon, I had a list of six likely places and forty possible names. I re-summoned the car and tossed the phones underneath the front seat, vanishing it again.

I hadn't remembered to bring any water; there was a drink from Fugly Bob's, but it was a soda and would leave my hands sticky. I sighed and focused on my hands.

The blood and other detritus vanished from my hands, but my inventory didn't affect living things, which meant that I likely still had bacteria all over my hands.

Did the Gamer's body make me immune to disease? I couldn't be sure.

I looked at my sleeve and I tried to inventory the blood off of it. My entire hoodie vanished.

Apparently I couldn't just inventory part of something; it shouldn't have surprised me since I couldn't inventory a door while it was attached to a building, but it had been worth trying.

I had the hoodie reappear, and I threw it in the car with the corpses after making sure to pull everything from the pockets.

It wasn't like I was going to go a laundromat with bloody clothes. I'd already screwed up enough on the bus.

I summoned the burger from Fugly Bob's and I was careful to only hold it by the wrapper. The drink hadn't even lost its fizz.

I was going to have to be a lot more careful if I was going to keep murdering people. Were there skill books on how to get away with crimes?

I couldn't afford to keep making stupid mistakes.

If I was lucky, no one would associate a few blood puddles with a girl with blood on one sleeve seen half the city away. If I was unlucky, some detective would check the bus routes and ask around.

I needed to be a ghost in the wind.


	5. Tailor

My climbing skill was improving by leaps and bounds. In a couple of days I'd leveled it up to fifty percent, and it really was taking me half the time to get up the wall that it had when I was started.

I could get up other buildings too; as long as there were reasonable handholds, I could scale walls that only three days ago would have been simply impassible.

My running speed was at fifty percent too. I could jog an easy ten miles an hour, and my distance kept expanding before I became fatigued.

Jogging at my old top speed only felt like a moderate strain. I could probably break twenty five miles an hour while sprinting, although I certainly couldn't maintain that for much longer than a normal person.

I'd been jogging around town, getting the lay of the land. There were a half dozen Empire hotspots that I'd identified through the texts on their phones.

It included two restaurants, a massage parlor, and a warehouse that served as a dogfighting arena. There were a couple of other addresses I wasn't sure about; it wasn't like they were texting each other the addresses or anything.

So far the police didn't seem to be looking for me; that didn't actually mean much considering that they'd hardly be issuing a manhunt based on a couple of pools of blood.

I carefully avoided the police as much as I could, and I used the skills I'd learned in the books to hide in the crowds when I couldn't.

I was getting better at hiding my face when people who I didn't want to see me came close, and to doing so without looking suspicious.

I'd climbed on top of a few roofs, and I'd observed the people going in and out of the dog fighting ring and the restaurants. I'd seen a few of the same people going in and out of multiple places; unfortunately my power didn't increase my visual acuity no matter how hard I stared at things.

I'd tried staring at things in the distance for an hour with no popup screens. I'd also tried staring at small things to no better effect.

I had gained +2 strength; I'd started with an 8 and now I was up to a 10. Given my other stats, I suspected that a 10 was what an average person started with. As a teen-aged girl with no particular penchant for exercise I'd been flabby.

It was making a difference in the weight I could lift, too. I was now about twenty five percent stronger than I had been before; at this point that only came to an extra twenty pounds or so, but I was encouraged at the gains I might end up making as time went on.

There was only so much I could do, observing people from a distance. Sooner or later someone would catch me at it, and then I'd be in the middle of a battle I might not be ready for.

I had to get closer.

The Empire had hundreds of members. I doubted that anyone would have known me by sight. One of the things that I'd had the foresight to do was to take all of the family pictures; first I'd done it because they were all I had left of my family.

There hadn't been all that many, really. Mom had never been the type to do a lot of photos and Dad hadn't been interested at all after Mom died.

My school yearbook didn't have any pictures of me over the past couple of years either; Emma had made a point of keeping me out of the yearbook as a way of reminding me just what a nonentity I was.

Ultimately, the only people who were likely to know what I looked like were either dead, or my classmates. While it was possible that some of them might have joined the Empire, I suspected that I hadn't made enough of an impression on them for them to remember who I was.

That's why I was taking the risk I was taking now.

"I'm looking for work," I said.

The restaurant manager stared at me. According to the texts I had read, her name was Gina and she was also the owner of the place. A lot of her clientele were Empire members.

"You don't look sixteen," she said.

"I'm fifteen," I admitted. If I said I was sixteen she'd ask for ID. "But you can work in this state as young as fourteen."

She frowned, looking at me critically. I knew I didn't make the best impression. I was wearing a hoodie- not the blood stained one, of course, but still, hardly like I was going to make the best impression.

I looked like a homeless kid.

According to the texts, Gina had a soft spot for homeless white kids. She kept pulling them up out of the gutters. Some of the Empire guys had made fun of her for being a soft touch.

"We've lost a few people," she said after a minute. "They went on to other lines of work."

They'd joined the gang. I knew that, and I knew that they needed help. That was why I'd selected them over the other restaurant. Also, the other restaurant was a lot higher class and likely wouldn't have to hire a fifteen year old.

She probably wouldn't have her work difficulties if her restaurant wasn't in Empire territory and if she could hire minorities. Unfortunately, even if she wasn't prejudiced, hiring minorities was out of the question when most of her clientele was Empire.

They'd been known to burn down businesses where the wrong kind of people were employed.

"I could only hire you for limited hours," she said. "Labor laws are pretty clear about that. And I couldn't let you work as a cook either or anything around the fryer. That's the law."

"I'm not looking for anything much," I said. "I'd be happy to bus tables."

I'd prefer to bus tables; it'd give me a chance to listen in on conversations in the restaurant.

"You'd have to dress better than that," she said. She looked at me and sniffed. "And I'm guessing you don't want your parents to know. Money under the table."

"Dad drinks," I said. "If he knew I had money..."

"No records," she said finally. "You'd have to just trust me to keep track of your pay."

"When would I work?"

"Three thirty to seven," she said. "You look too young to keep you on after that; I don't want any trouble with the law."

"Wouldn't have thought that would be an issue around here?" I asked. "I thought we were in the territory."

"Keep your mouth shut about that," she said firmly. "And about anything else you hear around here. Blabbing is a good way to get yourself killed."

I raised my hands.

"I've got no problem with guys who are just trying to protect their own," I said. "Sisters have to stick together, right?"

"You work weekdays," she said. "If you do a good job, I might move you up to Friday and Saturday nights if you do a good job."

"Any perks?" I asked.

"Leftover food at the end of the night," she said. "But I get to look through it before you either take it or throw it out. One free meal every eight hours. That's every couple of days for you."

I nodded.

From what the Nazis said on their phones, the food here was pretty good. The owner was also a member of the Empire, and a lot of their clientele was members too.

"What do I call you?" she asked.

"Emma," I said. "Emma Hess."

"Hess," she mused. "That's a good, strong German name."

I'd picked the two worst people I knew to name myself. The fact that one of them was a black girl with a German name was ironic in a way that didn't escape me.

Hearing Emma's name would keep me from getting too comfortable here.

Hopefully I'd be able to listen in on conversations, see faces, and maybe even follow some people home.

"I don't exactly have a bank account or ID," I said.

"I can pay cash," she said. "Just don't expect any payroll taxes taken out."

"I don't believe in taxes." I said.

"Well, the government does," she said. "And so you'd better keep your mouth shut about that. I'm taking pity on you, giving you this job. If I see you stealing, or making eyes at the waiters, or being lazy, you'll be out on your ear."

"Yes ma'am," I said.

"You're going to have to stay clean," she said. "Nobody wants dirty hair in their food. You'll have to wear a ponytail, and you'll have to wear a uniform. I'll give you the money to get one, and I'll send you to the place we get all of our uniforms made."

I nodded.

"Don't wear perfume," she said. "People like to be able to smell their food."

"I don't wear perfume anyway," I said.

"Well, don't start," she said. "This first week is just probationary. Since I'm paying you under the table, that means there's no records you ever worked here. There's no unemployment insurance, and no sick days."

Working sick probably wasn't good for the customers, but I didn't say anything. I wasn't even sure I _could _get sick.

It'd be easy enough to pay a homeless guy to buy me some booze and then see if it affected me. Would Gamer's mind keep me clear even if I was drunk? Could I get drunk?

Of course, my luck was that the minute I got drunk the Empire would track me down. Or I'd get suicidally brave and do something stupid like attack Lung.

She handed me some money.

I stared at her.

"This is a test," she said. "Show up tomorrow in a uniform, and I'll start thinking you might be a halfway honest person."

"And if I don't?" I asked.

"Then it's cheap to find out now instead of later when I find you with your hand in the till. I'd suggest not doing that, though; I've got friends that you probably wouldn't want to meet."

Right; this restaurant was an Empire front.

Probably shouldn't have been a surprise given the name of the restaurant. White's?

There was a business card mixed in with the bills. It had the address of the uniform store.

I left and went directly there; it wasn't hard to find for all that it was in an off street.

"Uniforms Inc," I muttered. Could they have chosen a blander name?

I opened the door, and I saw a lanky blonde haired man standing by a rack of uniforms.

"Uh, Gina sent me," I said.

He looked at the wadded bills in my hand, and he smiled.

"Another one of her charity cases, I suppose," he said. "For a moment, dressed like you are and with the look on your face, I thought you were someone needing other kind of outfits."

What did he mean by that?

Was it a sex thing?

I didn't get that vibe from him at all. If anything, he seemed a little effeminate.

What other kind of...

"Do you sell capes?" I asked.

"We may have done a uniform here or there that were custom jobs," he said. "Not for the Protectorate, of course. They have their own people in-house, even though we could do a better job at half the price."

"How much does a costume cost?" I asked, curious.

"We can be reasonably priced for the right kind of people," he said. "It's a great deal more for design work. Are you in the market for... capes?"

I shook my head.

"No... I was just curious. I wouldn't think that capes could afford that kind of service, not all of them."

"We aren't the only ones," he said. "Parian offers similar services, although her costumes tend not to wear as well as ours. But to answer your question, costs are usually covered by their organization, Loners have to make do with scraps."

I was in the prime age bracket for new capes; teenagers tended to be highly emotional, and in the Bay they tended to get into the kinds of situations leading to trigger events more than most.

Had Gina sent me here as a way of seeing if I was a Cape? Was this guy a thinker?

If he was, then I'd be an idiot to let him send word to Kaiser about what I was. On the other hand, it was possible that he was just a business owner trying to drum up business.

"Why mention it to me at all?"

"You look like the type," he said. "And if you should get work with an organization, you'll need a uniform. We provide all kinds of uniforms."

"Well, if I suddenly discover myself with superpowers and a boatload of cash, I'll keep you in mind."

"There are discounts for the right kind of people," he said lightly.

"You serve the wrong kind of people?" I asked.

He smiled slightly.

"Most of them do not choose to come through our door," he said. "Those that do find our prices to be... difficult."

I nodded as though I understood.

"Let's get you three uniforms," he said. "Although it's called Whites, the uniforms are a dark blue. She tried white uniforms, but they tended to show stains too much, even with everything we could do."

"I'd imagine that keeping blood from staining...specialty costumes would be in high demand."

"It can be done," he admitted, "But not at the price Gina is willing to pay."

I nodded.

I wondered what cloth they used; I didn't have the budget to keep replacing hoodies, and I'd only brought so many of them with me.

"Let's get you dressed," he said.

"Why did you think I might want a specialty outfit?"

"You are a young girl in the Bay," he said. "And you walk around with no sign of fear. Everybody is afraid here, except the Capes."

"I'm armed," I admitted. "And I know how to take care of myself. I'm no Cape, though."

Capes were the people who dressed up in silly costumes and followed rules. I wasn't a cape, even if I had powers.

He nodded, although I wasn't sure he believed me.

How close was he with the Empire, and did I need to worry about his spilling the beans? Was I really obvious, and would the other capes automatically know what I was, or was this guy just really perceptive?

I pushed observe while he was turned toward a set of racks.

JEAN CLAUDE MARCEAUX

Level 23

TAILOR AND FASHIONISTA.

What the fuck?

Most of the thugs I'd seen were levels four to six at best; run of the mill thugs were closer to level three. Assuming that the whole world wasn't just a video game, then my power associated threat and combat skill with levels.

This guy would likely wipe the floor with me; that meant that he was lying about my look. He probably saw something about how I moved that suggested some combat training.

That would be weird in a fifteen year old girl, but not in a cape.

"So you have close ties with organizations here?"

"I choose to follow the unwritten rules," he said without turning around. "I would not unmask a cape. My job is the opposite, after all. So please put the knife away."

I looked down, and I saw that I had a knife in my hand. I hadn't even been aware of summoning it. Had I been planning to murder him unconsciously?

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm a little on edge."

"It's perfectly all right," he said. "I'm a little like Gina. I'm a soft touch for hard luck cases. If you ever need a special kind of uniform, please feel free to give me a call."

"People with friends have a hard time keeping secrets," I said.

"Even an unpowered person can burn a shop down, if they are angry enough. A powered person can do far worse," he said. "I do not make it my business to get involved in Cape activities. My only concern is that the uniform I create for them serves admirably and well."

"I'm not a cape," I said. "But I'm a little worried about people talking about me. My dad drinks, and we've had enough people gossiping about us for a lifetime."

"Feel free to return," he said. "It's always good to see a defender of what's right."

Did he mean what was white?

"Here," he said.

He hadn't even measured me, but I stepped into a changing room, and I found that if fit like a glove.

It felt weirdly good.

Whatever else he was, he was a damn good clothier.

"I'd get a shower before going to work tomorrow," he said. "Gina is a stickler for cleanliness."

I nodded.

He gave me two other uniforms, identical to the one I was wearing.

"She'll expect you to have these laundered between uses, and pressed. You can do it yourself, or I can give you the addresses of some cleaners."

"I'll figure something out."

As I left, I wondered whether my idea to spy on the Empire was going to fall on its face the moment a cape came in.

Still, it was my best chance to get close to them. I'd make sure to have all my guns loaded in my inventory, and I'd have an escape plan worked out to get out if I should be attacked.

With luck, I'd be able to use the job as a way of identifying targets. By the time they figured out the common denominator, I'd be long gone.

Or at least that's what would happen in an ideal world.


	6. Fired Up

My encounter with Jean Claude had been unnerving. He was clearly much more than he seemed to be, given his level and his observational abilities.

It made me want to reconsider. My entire plan was based on the idea that I could slip in undetected and listen in enough to get a handle on these people's movement. The question was whether or not I could pull it off.

Maybe I needed to find a skill book on acting. The biggest danger to all of this would be my inability to bluff. Some of that would be due to nervousness, which Gamer's Mind would help with, but inexperience Would be harder to deal with.

I'd have to bite the bullet and go to a full priced bookstore. Presumably I was about to have a small income, which meant that I could probably afford to buy a few skill books.

It was eight o'clock, so I still had a couple of hours until the closest store closed. I had my work uniforms safely in inventory and I still had money to spend.

Uniforms Unlimited was actually in a nicer neighborhood than I was used to. He'd been right about one thing; eventually I'd Need a better costume, if only so my face would be concealed when doing things when murdering people.

I didn't need a full costume; real ninjas had worn the same clothes as everyone else. The danger had been that they could look like anyone.

All I needed was a hoodie and a mask.

The best thing to do would be to make my own, but that wasn't a skill I had, either in my personal life or through my power. That meant that I had to buy one or steal one.

The idea of wearing the masks of my defeated enemies was appealing; it would certainly add an intimidation factor. However, it was going to be a while before I could kill even a single cape.

At the moment, all I had was a Miss Militia handkerchief, a souvenir of the one time I'd visited the rig gift shop with MoM before she'd died. I Hadn't been thinking much about her lately; was that because of Gamer's Mind, or had I just been busy?

For a long time I hadn't been able to think of anything else; after all, I'd been the one she had been communicating with when she died. I had always blamed myself, but now I could see that it might have happened even if she wasn't texting me.

Kids always blamed themselves, even for things like their own parents' divorces. I'd had a part in Mom's death, but beating myself up about it now would just be hurting me for something that could not be changed.

Mom wouldn't have wanted that.

I had always thought that Dad had blamed me. Now I'd never know. Even if he had, he hadn't been in his right mind for years. He'd had a status effect, depression, as my power would describe it.

The smell of smoke suddenly became apparent to me. It wasn't strong, but it was acrid, and it was coming from the south.

I hesitated.

This probably had nothing to do with me, and at best it would be a distraction. Still, it might be an indication of a parahuman battle, and I might learn something.

Heading in the direction, I smelled the smoke, I found that the smell grew stronger and stronger over the next three blocks. Although the Uniform store had been in a nice neighborhood, we were now six blocks away, and in Brockton Bay sometimes that was all that was needed to make the difference between rich and poor.

The smoke was coming from somewhere a block away. Onlookers were gathering outside an apartment complex that was on fire. Smoke was pouring out of the upper windows and people were screaming.

The apartment complex was only three stories tall, but the rooms were not accessible from the outside. There had been fire escapes once; I could see lighter brick where they had once been. Had the fire escapes been damaged by parahuman battles, or had they been removed because they had made it too easy for criminals to break into residences homes?

For whatever reason, the apartment complex had become a death trap, nd the people on the third floor looked like they were in trouble.

Response time by the fire department in this neighborhood was abysmal, likely because it was close enough to merchant territory that there had been attacks. The merchants didn't care that they might be the next victims of a house fire. All they knew was that fire trucks often carried equipment that they could sell, including medications. They also often had parts that Squealer could use in her vehicular monstrosities.

I felt bad about the whole thing, but what could i possibly do? I did not have fire powers, and I could not jump up like a brute and carry people down. I couldn't teleport the victims, or bend space and time like Vista.

Vista probably wouldn't even be allowed to come here; the Protectorate liked to keep their agents solely focused on parahuman problems.

I began to turn away when an alert popped up on my screen.

NEW QUEST ALERT!

GET ALL FIRED UP!

SAVE THE POOR VICTIMS OF BROCKTON BAY'S GREED AND INEPITITUDE AND PROVE THAT YOU ARE MORE THAN JUST A MURDEROUS ASSASSIN.

REWARD: 100 XP PER VICTIM SAVED.

FAILURE: LOSS OF REPUTATION POSSIBLE DEATH.

Shit.

My power seemed to think that there was something I could do with my abilities to save these people. It hadn't even bothered to ask me to accept the quest. Presumably I simply wouldn't get any points if I didn't save anyone.

Yet there was something about the wording of the quest. Was this a choice that would define my path going foreword? It would be easy to lose your soul by murdering eight hundred people, especially of there was nothing to balance it out on the other side.

I'd always wanted to be a hero, and while the path I'd Committed myself wasn't just that, I couldn't sit and watch as people died if there was anything I could do about it.

Could I stack cars with my power?

I likely could, but it would give away my power and would likely get me killed. Besides, panicked people trying to climb down a stack of twenty cars would likely end up falli g and hurting themselves.

"What's going on?" I Asked a man standing near the back of the crowd.

"Somebody had a meth lab on the second floor," he said. "Blew themselves up and started a fire that filled the second floor. The carpets are all on fire and the walls."

"Can't someone do something?" I asked.

"The fire is too hot, and there's too much smoke," he said. "Nobody could get through. The people on the third floor are dead."

"How do you know all of this?" I asked.

"I'm writing an article about corruption in the city government," he said. "The landlord bribed the inspectors to look the other way about the fire escapes, even though it was an obvious violation of the city code. That means that every inspector who came by here chose to look the other way."

The deaths would give his story meaning.

"Do you live here?"

"We all live here," I said. "This city is our home. Everybody who walked by here and saw what was happening and didn't do anything is complicit."

He brightened at that.

"Can I quote you on that, Miss?" He asked, but I had already used my stealth skill to slip away through the crowd while he was looking down for his notebook. I hoped it looked like I had just vanished.

The problems were likely three fold in nature. There was the fire, there was the smoke, which likely contained all sorts of unhealthy chemicals, and there was whatever structural damage had been done by the fire already.

The first thing I needed was water. I could try to inventory the water from a fire hydrant, but it would take far too Long. People were dying even as I stood there.

We were in the northeastern part of the city, between the docks and the train yard. The Bay was only five blocks away- that was three thousand feet or so away.

If I sprinted, I could be there in two And a half minutes; five minutes round trip. It would be obvious that I was moving faster than a normal person too, so I shouldn't wear one of my normal hoodies.

I pulled up my hood and I passed by a group of young street punks who were laughing about the fire. The people around them were visibly uncomfortable, but there was an aura of danger about the boys that had everyone looking away from them.

Perfect.

The boy in the back of the group was wearing a heavy leather jacket, one that would be a little large on me, but that would provide a little protection From the fire. Furthermore, he and his friends were all facing away from me at the back of the crowd and everyone else was looking away from them.

I slipped a Miss Militia handkerchief over my mouth, and as I passed by him, I tapped him on the shoulder.

"Inventory," I murmured, and the jacket disappeared from his back.

I'd already slipped into the crowd by the time he noticed that the jacket was gone. By the time I turned the corner, I had the jacket on my own back, and then I was running.

It was real leather too, not the more flammable fake leather.

I wore the jacket over my hoodie, with the hood up. It took me a couple of minutes to reach the Bay, and I waded out into the water up to my waist.

"Inventory, inventory, inventory, inventory," I chanted. I filled a single slot with fifty units of the same thing, water. Each unit of water was close to my limit of weight, a little more than a ton.

Each ton of water was about the same as that in eight bathtubs. I filled two slots with fifty tons of water in each slot.

One hundred tons of water might not be a lot, but it was the best I could do. I was acutely aware of the passage of time; people were dying as I sat with my hand in the water, watching water vanish in great gulps all around me only to be refilled over and over again.

I stepped out of the water, and then I sprinted back.

A message told me that my running speed had increased to sixty percent, which meant that it took less time To get back than it had to get there.

Still, five minutes had made all the difference. There was no sign of any firemen, fire trucks or police. The flames were twice the size they had been before, and the smoke billowing from The top floor had changed color, from white to gray. I could no longer see the top floor, and I wondered if everyone had already died.

The smoke had already filled the floors below; the fire was spreading. The impression I had was that the lower floors had been evacuated already.

The handkerchief wouldn't provide much protection, but the fact that I had soaked my pants And coat would presumably help a little.

I could presumably eat to recover my health, provided the fire wasn't so hot that it would kill me immediately, or if I got trapped in it.

Reaching the apartment complex, I noticed that the crowd had grown even larger. I Pushed my way through people, and I ran up to the front door.

Smoke filled the entranceway, and as I pushed my way through the door, I immediately began coughing.

"Inventory," I said, and the smoke in the room immediately cleared. I felt a little light headed, because the smoke had taken up some of the oxygen in the room, and that had not been replaced.

The room began filling up with smoke almost immediately, but I was already pushing my way forward. I ran through the lobby, fighting to reach the stairs.

The stairs were fortunately made of concrete. I ran up the stairs two at a time.

"inventory, Inventory, Inventory," I Said, pulling more and more of the smoke into my inventory. The problem was that the smoke was replaced almost as soon as it was Vanished.

It was at the second floor that I saw the problem. A ceiling had collapsed, Filling the stairwell with rubble.

-5 hp! BURNING DAMAGE.

As I touched the rubble and said "Inventory," I felt A sharp, burning pain in my hand. I Banished the Rubble, only for more to fall from above.

-5 HP BURNING DAMAGE!

NEW SKILL CREATED!

FIRE RESISTANCE!

-2% TO BURNING DAMAGE PER LEVEL

STACKS WITH PHYSICAL DAMAGE RESISTANCE!

LEVEL 1 -2 %.

I quickly ate some candy bars to restore my health, throwing the wrappers on the floor. I Then resumed my task, banishing rubble piece by piece along with the smoke.

By the time I reached the third floor, I'd gained 6 levels of fire resistance. Added to my physical resistance, I was now 16% resistant to fire.

There was a wall of flames in front of me, and so I now began to release the water, spilling water from the Bay into the hallway. As a ton of wateR hit the floor, I could hear the floor groan with the added weight, but there wasn't anything I Could do.

The pressure from the water knocked several doors down; they were only hanging on by a thread. People had blocked the doorways with everything they could think of. Towels, blankets And the like were washed away by the water.

"INventory, inventory, inventory," I said. "Is anybody still alive?"

The only sound was that of crackling flames and falling pieces of masonry. The voices I'd expected to hear weren't there.

"Inventory, inventory, inventory," I said. Each time I summoned water, I dropped it from the ceiling. It hit me like a ton of bricks, and my knees buckled.

As quickly as the water soaked me, providing some protection from the fire, the ambient heat dried me off. The steAm that was created was blindingly hot.

I chewed dried trail mix over and over, and yet damage was still hitting me. My heat resistance kept rising, too. Six levels quickly became twelve, and then fifteen. Along with my physical resistance, I was now reducing the fire damage by more than a third.

I couldn't focus on anything other than eliminating the fire. The people would have to wait, because I couldn't save anyone while the smoke and fire continued.

The leather jacket I'd stolen was in tatters, burned over and over again until it was ready to fall apart.

I filled the area with water, collected smoke and then filled the area with water again. The heat was intense; It was hot enough that even with Gamer's Body it was hard to breathe.

How long it took, I had no idea. All I knew was that my inventory of water was rapidly depleting, while I had a growing inventory of smoke.

I'd been so focused on the fire that I hadn't been able to tell whether a single person was still alive up here.

I was coming to the end of My water, leaving the floor covered with almost a foot of water. The fire was still going, although there was less than a quarter of it left.

Finally my water was depleted, and I was standing in a foot of water.

"Inventory," I said.

The water was high enough to hit my ankle, and that was enough for me to inventory the water closest to me. I Ran back and inventoried the most water I could. A Lot of it had turned to steam, but . Was able to collect enough to continue until the last of the fire had vanished.

I'd undoubtedly done a lot of damage to the floor and the ceiling of the floor below. The question now was whether I'd saved anyone.

I'd wondered why people hadn't tried jumping out of windows; we were only on the third story, and falling seemed less painful than burning to death.

The windows were barred, likely from before the fire escapes had been removed. The owner was going to have a lot of explaining to do.

The first label over a huddled figure beside a window was definitive.

Corpse.

They'd clearly tried to break out of the bars; I could see the tools they'd tried to use to get out. This first body was so burned that . Couldn't even tell what gender it had been, and the descriptor told me nothing either. They had been Next to the window, desperately trying to breathe.

The second room had a dead family of three. The third was a coUple.

It was in the fourth room that I finally found two survivors. I suspected that they'd had more time to prepare than the others. It was a woman and a teenaged girl. Their window was somewhat larger than most of the others, because it was in a corner, and their Room was farther away from The fire than the others.

Despite this, they were both in critical condition. They'd inhaled too much smoke, and their skin was burned.

As quickly as I could, I began to perform CPR on them. I could hear the sound of sirens finally coming. I did my best to perform CPR on both of them, bit it was quickly apparent that it was impossible.

The woman was worse off; she'd covered her daughter with her own body, and her lungs were much worse.

I had to make a choice, and I did.

By the time the fire fighters reached us, the woman was dead, but her daughter was still alive.

As the paramedics came to take over, I found an alert on my screen.

ALL FIRED UP!

QUEST COMPLETE!

100 XP.

Somehow I was less than impressed.


	7. Roll

The whole incident left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd risked revealing myself as a cape, and I hadn't really saved anyone.

I'd saved one girl, but would she actually live? I'd heard that damage to the lungs could kill or leave you with permanent debilitating breathing problems.

Even if Panacea managed to help the girl, her mother was dead. She'd lived in a shitty apartment in a dangerous building, which meant that she didn't have a lot of resources to fall back on. It wasn't likely that she'd have an inheritance.

The best-case scenario was that she had a grandmother or other relative to go live with. The worst was that she would end up in the system; which is what would happen to me if I gave up and turned myself in, giving up on any thoughts of revenge.

Hopefully there hadn't been anyone with a cellphone to get footage of me, or witnesses who could give my description. I'd seen enough crime shows to know how even small details were sometimes all it took to bring down a criminal.

The only good thing about the whole debacle was that I'd gained a fair amount of fire resistance, and I'd learned a new way to use my Inventory.

I was pretty sure that I had some sort of poison resistance due to Gamer's body, too, although I hadn't gotten a popup, because my clothes reeked of chemicals badly enough that I threw them into the corpse car with no plans to ever wear them again.

I couldn't even try to find out what happened to the girl I'd saved, not without arousing suspicions about who I was.

Worrying about things I couldn't change wasn't going to get me anywhere. Ultimately, it wasn't likely that I was going to be able to kill all eight hundred members of the Empire. Sooner or later one of them would get lucky and that would be the end of me.

But I wanted the survivors to remember me, and to remember Dad the next time they tried to victimize someone.

And maybe, just maybe, I'd get strong enough, fast enough that I really could take down enough of them to make a difference. I'd heard that the criminal gangs in the city had a balance; if I could make the Empire look weak, it was possible that I didn't have to do all the killing myself.

The ABB would be happy to capitalize on any weaknesses, and I wondered if any deaths from other gangs would attribute to me.

I'd been periodically checking the quest, and I'd noticed that the number of people I had to kill was moving up and down by ten r so on a daily basis. Presumably, if the ABB killed people, then I'd just have a smaller number left to complete my own task.

How I could start a gang war, I didn't know.

Should I attack the ABB and then leave some of the bodies from the Empire guys on the scene? That might work, assuming the ABB used knives instead of guns

Still, I was hardly an expert on staging a crime scene, and a mistake there might lead to me getting caught earlier.

I needed to go to a bookstore and find some skill books on forensics. My best bet was to make sure that no one knew where the crime scenes were, but there might come a time where I didn't have time for all of that.

Still, my first priority was getting ready for my part time job.

She'd asked that I shower, so the first thing I needed was to get some clean water from somewhere other than the bay. That was easy enough. I just had to slip into someone's backyard in the middle of the day and practice filling a single slot slowly from a water hose.

The water would not be warm, and I wasn't likely to enjoy my shower, but the truth was that I smelled like smoke and chemicals and I was going to need a shower anyway.

Water hoses are excruciatingly slow to fill up; I'd heard it could take all day to fill up a small swimming pool. The hose delivered about seventeen gallons a minute, which meant that I was there for half an hour watching and being afraid that a homeowner or the police would come and try to throw me out.

I went home and took a long shower. I had to bathe for a long time to get the meth fumes out of my hair, and the water wasn't even cold enough to give me any sort of resistances.

I did prove that I could control the amount I could release if it was a liquid or gas.

When I finally felt clean, I went to a bookstore in the area near White's, looking for more skill books.

There weren't any books about how to get away with crimes, which was sort of surprising giving the world we lived in. People were villains for all sorts of reasons, and I would have expected a Dummy's Guide or something.

"Taylor?"

I turned, startled.

My father's friend Kurt was standing near an endcap, staring at me.

"My God," he said, approaching me. "What happened to you? Where's your Dad?"

My mind raced.

This was Kurt. He wasn't just some Empire thugs that I could get rid of to conceal my identity. He was a good man, and he deserved more than to be thrown in a car on top of a pile of corpses.

"Can we talk outside?" I said, looking around. There weren't many people here, not at this hour, but all I needed was for someone to overhear us, and things would go badly for me very quickly.

He nodded, and we both headed outside.

His car was nearby, and I nodded toward it, and he let me in.

"Drive," I said shortly.

He pulled out into traffic.

"What's going on?" he asked. "Where's your Dad?"

"He's dead," I said.

The car swerved and almost hit someone in the oncoming lane. I felt ashamed at the thought that this might have solved my problem for me.

"What? "he asked.

"The Empire killed him," I said. "They tried to kill me too, but it didn't take."

"But why?"

"They wanted the Dockworkers and he wouldn't play ball." I said. "I expect that they're going to try to put one of their people in Dad's old job."

His lips tightened. "There have been some people nosing around. We've been keeping the job open for him, but…why didn't you go to the police?"

"The Empire doesn't know I'm alive," I said. "Most of them don't know what I look like. If I go to the police, then they'll know and they'll come after me."

"Just tell them where his body is, then?" Kurt said.

"If I do that, they'll wonder where the second body is," I said. "And then they'll come after me."

"Are you on your own?" he asked. "I know you haven't been to school."

"I'm a cape now," I said. "I triggered when Dad died."

I help my hand out and a cup of steaming Ramen noodles appeared. I made it vanish a moment later.

"Still, you could come and stay with me and Lacey," he said.

"They'll be watching all of Dad's friends," I said. "They may have tapped your phones."

"Why would they…" his eyes widened. "Their people didn't come back."

I was silent and looked away from him.

"I can't call the police," I reiterated. "Or go to anybody in my old life. They'd hold you hostage to get to me."

"You aren't out doing anything dangerous, like fighting crime, are you?"

I shook my head.

"I'm just keeping my had down. I've got a place to live and an honest way to make money, and eventually all of this will die down. I plan to go back to having a normal life someday."

He looked troubled.

"I just wished there was something I could do for you," he said. He thought for a moment, and then he pulled over onto a side street.

He reached into his wallet and pulled out three hundred dollars in twenties.

"It's all I've got on me," he said.

"No," I said. "I couldn't. I know how hard it's been for you and Lacey over the last few years."

"Your Dad was the one who got me my job in the first place," he said. "I wouldn't have anything if it wasn't for him."

I hesitated.

"This is a loan," I said. "I'll make sure to pay you back, with interest."

I would, too. I'd heard that the gangs had a lot of money in stash houses, and once I was strong enough to start hitting those, my money problems were going o be over.

"You aren't…prostituting yourself, are you?"

My head snapped around, shocked.

"I've got a job!" I said. "A legitimate job!"

"It takes documents to get a job," he said.

"Well, semi-legitimate," I admitted. "I'm getting paid under the table. It's better than being on the streets, though, and it's only part time, but I don't have a lot of expenses."

He shook his head.

"Your Dad wanted me and Lacey to be your Godfather and Godmother," he said. "It's in his will."

"You aren't of any use to me dead," I said. "Maybe when things blow over."

He was silent for a moment, and then he closed his eyes.

"Is there at least some way I can communicate with you?"

"I know where you are," I said. "And if I think it's safe, I'll get in contact."

There was an awkward silence, and I opened the door. He was staring at me.

"I promise things will get better," I said.

Then I released some of the water from my inventory to splatter on the other side of the car. His head snapped around, and I leaped upward to cling to a loose brick on the wall. I clambered up the wall like a monkey; after all this time I'd gotten my climb skill up to a hundred percent, which had doubled my speed, and made climbing easy.

He got out of the car and looked around. Like most people, he didn't look up, and by the time he did, I was already on the roof out of sight.

I waited until he closed the passenger side door and drove off before I let myself lean against a wall.

Fuck.

I could only hope that he took my warnings seriously. If he started trying to insist that Dad was dead, he was likely to get himself and Lacey killed.

People would give up all sorts of information under torture, and that meant that I needed to move up my schedule if I was to kill as many of these people as I could before they caught up to me.

Maybe what I should have been looking for was a book n disguises.

Again, I couldn't change what had happened, not without killing Kurt, which I did not want to do. I'd have to trust him.

Climbing back down unseen was another challenge, since cars kept passing by, but I was working hard to improve my stealth skills. I'd learned that I really enjoyed doing the disappearing act, and getting that skill to its highest level was probably as important if not more so than working on my combat abilities.

Looking at my watch, I realized that it was getting to be close to time before my shift.

Stepping behind a trash dumpster, I switched to one of the uniforms in inventory instantly. I didn't even feel the cool air on my skin like some of the magical girl transformations.

I then walked to White's, slowly and casually.

I noticed that the Empire goons on the street nearby were treating me differently than they'd treated most of the women around. There were no catcalls, no harassment. They simply nodded toward me respectfully.

Apparently, that was the value of working at a place their bosses liked to eat at. There must have been a moratorium on bothering us, sort of a perk of the job.

I was there five minutes early.

The owner looked at me closely before finally nodding grudgingly.

"So, you showed up," she said.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Every job here is important," she said. "If you lose the customer's trust, you lose the business. Everything has to be spotlessly clean, and it has to run like a well-oiled machine."

I nodded.

I'd been responsible for cleaning during Dad's depression. I'd cooked too.

"I'm going to start you as a dish washer," she said. "And if that goes well, we can see about getting you something better."

Crap.

I'd hoped to be able to listen in on conversations in the restaurant.

My disappointment must have shown on my face, because she said, "Did you want another job, princess?"

I hesitated, then shook my head. I could use the money, and there might be opportunities here. If it was a total bust, I could always just leave.

At the very least, it would help me get used to the faces of the people I was planning to kill.

"Joseph, show her how we clean the dishes," she told a lanky teenager who looked to be a couple of years older than me.

When she left, Joseph said, "Don't worry about her. We all start out washing dishes, and it's actually an important job. Nothing will turn customers away faster than dirty dishes."

"I was kind of hoping to bus tables," I admitted.

"That's one step up the chain. The boss says that everybody should learn how to do all the jobs in the business. That way, if you should open your own restaurant later, you'll know how to make it successful."

"Does it bother you that all the Empire guys come here?"

"Bother me?" he shook his head. "Do you know how often the average restaurant here in the Bay gets robbed? I worked at a couple of those, and sometimes it seems like people are holding them up every other week."

He handed me a cup and showed me how to clean it.

"I've worked here a year, and I haven't seen a single person shot. My last two jobs I had guns held on me five times, and I saw two people murdered. I'm safe here, even from the Empire guys as long as I wear this uniform."

I nodded slowly.

"Besides, if it wasn't for the Empire, Lung would have taken over the whole damn city. He loves putting white girls in brothels. No, you are much safer here."

I was quiet as he spent the next half hour showing me how to clean the dishes.

The next few hours were full of mindless drudgery. The kitchen was apparently hot enough that the staff was all sweating, but I barely noticed it.

I was the only one not sweating.

"I don't know how you aren't burning up back here," Joseph said. "Everybody else is taking smoke breaks to get out of the heat."

"I need this job," I said. "And I'm used to the heat. I used to live with my grandmother, and she was cold all the time."

"You don't anymore?"

I looked at him, and he looked away.

"Right."

"So, I was thinking," he said. "There's this thing happening at eight, and I was wondering if you might want to go."

"What kind of thing?" I asked.

"A sporting event," he said. "With some betting."

"What kind of event?" I asked.

"Well, it's kind of like mixed martial arts…MMA, but more informal."

I hesitated.

"Are you asking me out to the cage fights?"

"Yeah?" he said. "I wanted to show you that some of the Empire guys aren't as bad as the media and the PRT likes to pretend."

"How would we get there?" I asked.

"I've got a car," he said. He looked down. "It's not a great car, not on my salary, but it'll get us to where we're going."

I pretended to consider, but inwardly I was elated. He was going to show me where the cage fights were. Once I'd been seen there, and knew how to get in, I'd be able to go again.

This might even be better than listening in on conversations in the restaurant.

"Does it cost a lot to get in?" I asked.

"Cover is twenty bucks," he said. "But I know you haven't had your first paycheck, so I'll pay this time."

"All right," I said.

I was going to the fights, wearing a uniform that would leave me unmolested. At last, things were beginning to roll!


End file.
